“Working at the Top in SK Group: an Insiders' Story”
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The Korea Business Interview Series “Working at the Top in SK Group: An Insiders’ Story” with Dr. Linda Myers, who was "inpatriated" to Seoul to raise global mindsets, lead global talent management, develop global policies and practices, and help accelerate globalization of the SK Group. She previously earned her masters and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. Transcript of the Interview by KBC’s Tom Tucker on November 1 Tom: Hello, and thanks for joining us today at KoreaBusinessCentral.com. My name is Tom Tucker. I’m the host today, and I’m pleased that you could join us for this latest discussion in our Korea Business Interview Series. Today I’m pleased to welcome Dr. Linda Myers, who is the first foreign female to have ever worked in South Korea at the executive level as the Vice President of Talent Management for SK Group. Linda earned her doctorate from Harvard University, and she’s built a strong career and reputation in global human resources over the past 20 years, and was recruited by SK Telecom in the summer of 2007 to help globalize its business. By early 2008, she had been promoted to the role of Vice President of Talent Management for SK Holding Company, the keystone company of the SK Group. Linda, welcome and thanks for joining us today. It’s great to have you. Dr. Myers: I’m delighted to have been invited to join you, Tom, on the Korea Business Interview Series. Happy to be here. Tom: Well, great. Linda, let’s begin by having you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background and your experiences before joining SK. Dr. Myers: Certainly. Well, hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, meaning that we’re able to understand much more when we look backward in time. So with this as the context, it’s quite clear today that my early personal background was the catalyst for my professional choices. There were four factors to this preparation for my global career. Let me explain. First, I was the oldest child of two deaf adults and I lived within the culture of deafness in which my parents used primarily verbal and added sign language communication with one another and with my brother and me. Second, my mother and her family all came from Vienna during World War II, which increased my understanding of cultural and linguistic differences that were created by geography. Third, as a result of these early experiences and the sensitivity to others that this cultivated in me, I was chosen as an 11-year-old to be a representative from the United States to an international youth summer village, which was held over a summer at a boarding school in southern Norway. I’m not going to tell you what year it was. Kids from age 11, who represented 10 different countries participated. We had lots of activities to engage us in cross-cultural understanding. So by the time I was 11, I had traveled to Europe and developed relationships with other kids from other countries and other cultures. All these experiences, these early experiences, prepared me very early in life for a career working in global human resources. Years later, I spent my junior year of college in England, and when I chose my profession in human resources, my travel bug activated again and I favored the global. What this means is that I worked for companies after I graduated from college that were international. I was able to travel a little bit for work, and then later, I prepared for and I earned my professional global HR certification. By the time I was 40, I had traveled to every continent. So far, I’ve worked for different lengths of time in Asia, South America and Europe, and I’d like to continue my global work and find another continent like Australia or the subcontinent of India in which to work. Tom: Sounds terrific, sounds very interesting. I’m really looking forward to digging in here a little bit more with you. Let’ s talk about the sequence of events that led up to your work at SK, and what was your position and responsibilities there with the company? Dr. Myers: Sure. Well, one day in mid-July 2007, I was going through my email box, and I noticed that I had received an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognize, and it turned out to be a Korean executive recruiter saying that he represented a South Korean company that was looking for individuals with competency in global human resources. Basically, he was asking me whether I was interested in interviewing for a position with a Korean company. I was skeptical as well as curious at first, t I became more interested as I did my homework, even though I knew enough by then to know that if I accepted the job, I would be taking a pretty significant career risk. My suspicion was confirmed when my colleague at the Society for Human Resources Management in Washington, D.C., which is the largest human resources association in the world, could not refer me to anyone who had been hired from the United States directly into a Korean company. For that matter, they couldn’t refer me to anyone who had ever worked overseas in South Korea. I knew that professionals had to be sent to Korea as expats from U.S, or European countries, but at that point, I just couldn’t find them. But that didn’t stop me. Until that point in my career, I had never assumed a job that anyone else had filled before me, and it looked as though this could follow the same pattern. I’d always been a trailblazer. I enjoyed the work, and this opportunity meant that I could possibly do my trailblazing overseas. In these emails, my job was explained very simply without any job description and without any list of objectives, and it was to help SK Telecom globalize. I had no idea what that meant in concrete terms, but I was pretty self-confident that I could go about analyzing the telephone company once I arrived in Korea. Even after I arrived, there was no job description. There was hardly, as I would learn quickly, even no orientation and no preparation for absorbing me into the organization. This was really puzzling to me at first, and soon I realized that there just wasn’t going to be any support. I was going to have to figure this out all on my own. It took me four months to understand that I was working for one company in a 12-company group. I had no idea that SK was a group until I began to see the SK logo on many other buildings in Seoul and on the metal overhead roofs of gas stations. I was so confused. I just thought that logos were interchangeable in Korea, and that idea wasn’t so strange because there was so many other things that were so strange to me when I first came. But when I finally broke down and asked, I was laughed at, presumably, for my ignorance. After that, I created a graphic to explain the structure of SK Group that I gave to everyone inside and outside the company, which made its way into every presentation and every orientation I ever created. Now, no one will ever be confused about SK Group. Tom: It does sound a bit confusing, and a bit overwhelming and a bit intimidating to come into such a situation without support, without the roadmap and to have to figure out everything on your own. It sounds like it was definitely an interesting and challenging situation. Tell us a little bit about SK for those in our audience who might not be familiar with the group. Dr. Myers: Well, SK Group is a holding company. It’s a conglomerate of different businesses that is owned by the Chey family. It begun in 1953 just after the Korean War. The fledgling Korean government gave businesses its support as well as favors to certain families to begin businesses that would help to restore the country after the devastation of war. Today, SK Group has about 35,000 employees working across 12, 13, 14 different companies in energy and gas, telecom and shipping, import and export, computers, engineering and construction, securities, hotels, and chemicals. It’s really easiest to understand all of the South Korean conglomerates which includes famous companies like Samsung, LG and Hyundai, as well as Doosan, which are all called chaebols, by thinking about our solar system with the sun in the middle and the planets revolving around it. A holding company is essentially like the sun and owns the company logo. At SK Group, SK executives called the logo the wings of happiness, even though the rest of the world sees a yellow and orange butterfly with the letters S and K embedded in the wings. You can see it on the website www.skcareers.com, as well as any other page that belongs to the SK Group. The other operating companies that belong to the SK Group belongs so when they pay a licensing fee to the holding company as well as when they promise to follow an internally- developed management system as well as a performance evaluation process. These are the only things that are uniform across the group. The holding company owns the business’ assets and the operating companies have possession of the assets, but don’t own the assets.